…you go back to Bash, and try to type this:

ls –R | grep “foo”

…and wonder why it’s not finding any file with “foo” in it.

The source code for IronCow and Milkify are now hosted directly on Codeplex. Anybody can therefore checkout the latest source code and submit patches!

I’m a huge fan on pass-phrases. Since Jeff already evangelised them over passwords, giving arguments and advice, there’s no need to add anything…

Except, well, some good old complaining.

It pisses me off that some websites have a limited length for passwords, thus preventing users from using pass-phrases. It’s not a pass-phrase if it can only have a maximum of 12 characters, is it? But the worst is how most of those websites won’t even warn you that your password is too long… they will just truncate it and tell you everything’s okay! And then, the next time you log in, you spend 10 minutes wondering how you can mistype 50 times a passphrase you’re absolutely sure about.

Now, time to point some fingers. Recently, the 2 websites that gave me this kind of crappy user experience were the Archos Store (after creating a new account) and Linked In (after changing my password on an existing account). It’s especially surprising how a high profile website like Linked In can be so poorly implemented.

One of my laptops is getting old and the lid is not as sturdy as it used to be. It now has the unwanted tendency of triggering a “laptop lid open” event when you barely touch it because the lid moves up a bit and back down. This is problematic because it wakes up the operating system, which doesn’t always detect that the lid was closed immediately.

When you run an internet search about laptop lids and putting Windows on stand by or hibernate, you find a lot of stuff, but nothing useful about disabling resume. To solve this problem you need to think like a programmer, i.e. find a solution that kinda makes sense, but not really.

Obviously, the answer lies in the Power Options dialog, but the only setting you have access to is what to do when the lid is closed, not when it is open.

Well, here comes the shocking answer: if you put your computer on stand by when you close your lid, it will wake up when you open it. But if you don’t do anything when you close your lid, it won’t do anything either when you open it!

Setting that first combobox above to “Do nothing” therefore fixed my problem. Now, I can close the lid, let the computer go to sleep after 5 minutes of inactivity, and move it around without fear of it waking up because the lid is too sensitive. I do have to press the power button to wake it up instead of just opening it, but that’s not too awful.

Stephen Walther recently blogged about tricks that every developer should know about Visual Studio. Most of those he mentioned I use on a daily basis, so I highly recommend them. It actually surprises me how many other programmers don’t know about those features. Somehow, most programmers know Visual Studio as much as they know Microsoft Word: there’s a big space in the middle to type your text, and then maybe they know a couple of menus and shortcuts and that’s it.

Anyway, here are a few other features I use frequently:

Tip #1 – Use CTRL-I for incremental search

I’m a big fan of incremental search. It’s actually the reason I originally switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox, back when Firefox was in beta (I already had tabs with Netcaptor). By the way, I’m happy to see IE8 now also features incremental search but, well, I’m hooked on FF now… anyway…

In Visual Studio, the incremental search mode is entered with CTRL-I. Then you can start typing right away what you want to find. You can also use backspace and all, as expected. The only problem is that it uses the last search mode defined in the “Find” dialog, so if the “Match case” option is currently checked, it will only perform incremental search on what you type in a case sensitive way. This may be a bit confusing at first, but using incremental search really makes navigating code faster.

Tip #2 – Use navigate backward and forward

Like the first tip, this tip make it faster to navigate code (because we’re spending more time reading code than writing code).

CTRL– (minus sign) and CTRL-SHIFT– allow you to respectively navigate backward and forward. The first one is the one I use almost all the time: I’m looking at some code, see a call to a function, go to the definition of that function, search for something, and then I want to go back to where I was at first. Well, without having to worry about anything, I can navigate backward twice and I end up where I want. No need to find the correct tab, figure out if I stayed in the same file or not while jumping through the code, etc. Wicked!

Tip #3 – Define some external tools

You can define “external tools” with, surprisingly, the Tools > External Tools menu item. A common thing for me is to define revision control related stuff there because most of the time I don’t like how buggy and slow source control plugins are. I also do this in Visual Studio Express where there is no support for plugins at all in the first place.

For example, say you’re using Perforce. You can create a new external tool like this:

It will checkout the current file (the one you’re editing if the focus is in the text editor, or the one selected in the Solution Explorer if that’s where the focus is). Now you just need to bind “Tools.ExternalCommand2” (because it’s the second external tool) to the keyboard shortcut of you choice (mine is CTRL-K, CTRL-E for “open for edit”). Shazam! Just use your keyboard shortcut and you can checkout a file without leaving the text editor.

You can setup other commands, like show the history of the file or make a diff with the previous version. You can also easily adapt this to other systems, like SubVersion (except in this case you won’t need the “open for edit” command because SVN doesn’t lock files by default).

IronCow is a library that wraps the Remember The Milk (RTM) web services. The “upper layer” of the IronCow API is an object model that stays in sync with the server and is designed with data binding in mind.

Of course, one of the things that went into IronCow’s design was testability. IronCow ships with a suite of unit tests that, well, test that the API is working fine. However, there’s another testability aspect: how the clients of your API are going to test their stuff. These are 2 different things:

• Within IronCow, “design for testability” means I have to be able to mock the underlying client that communicates with the RTM REST API. Then, I can manipulate my objects and check that the correct requests are sent, and that those objects behave correctly according to the responses I give.
• From the point of view of a client, though, “design for testability” means they have to be able to make IronCow behave a certain way, and test that the rest of their application behave accordingly.

The easy way to make an API testing friendly is to put everything behind interfaces. This way, the client can replace your stuff with test objects. But for some reason, I don’t feel like adding this kind of complexity to IronCow. It’s a pretty small API, with an object models that contains less than a dozen of classes, and hiding everything behind interfaces would triple the number of classes, add a couple of abstract factories, and more generally confuse clients that would otherwise expect a straightforward API.

Therefore, right now, to use IronCow in a test environment, you can disable the “syncing” behaviour like this:

Rtm rtm = new Rtm(); // You can also pass in your apiKey and
// sharedSecret here but it doesn't matter.
rtm.DisabledSyncing();
// From now on, there's no requests being sent.

When syncing is disabled, the IronCow object model just acts like a “dumb” object tree. Setting the name of a task or adding a new contact won’t trigger a request to RTM. Instead, it will just modify the objects locally, as if it was just a classic simple in-memory object model.

Note that you can’t reenable syncing.

The problem with this is that although the complexity of the public interface stays the same, the complexity of the internal code increases. I find it doesn’t increase nearly as much as when I tried to hide everything behind interfaces though. The other bigger problem is that it’s more complicated for clients to do behavioural testing. For example, if they want to test what happens in their application when a certain action makes IronCow throw an exception, there’s nothing to help them do that… In that case, they have to mock the IRestClient class, and use it with their Rtm instance. There are helper classes and methods to build RTM XML responses, but it’s not what you would call super user friendly (check the IronCow.UnitTests assembly source code for examples of how to use it).

So is this fine? No? Should I bite the bullet, add interfaces, and make this simple API be 3 times bigger and more complex? Is there a third option?

Microsoft apparently fixed something in .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 that previously didn’t work, or somehow worked differently. As a result, Milkify will crash if used on a machine that doesn’t have this service pack installed.

What you get is a XamlParseException that says that a ContentStringFormat property cannot be converted into a TemplateBindingExtension. This is because Milkify is using its own WPF skin where, among others, the check box control has a new custom template. This template is mainly a copy of the default one, courtesy of ShowMeTheTemplate, and looks like this:

<ControlTemplate x:Key="CheckBoxControlTemplate">
    <BulletDecorator>
        <BulletDecorator.Bullet>
            <Grid>
                <Border 
                  Width="18"
                  Height="18" 
                  CornerRadius="4"
                  BorderThickness="2"
                  BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}"
                  Background="{StaticResource MilkifyWhite}"
                  HorizontalAlignment="Center" 
                  VerticalAlignment="Center" />
                <Rectangle
                  Width="6"
                  Height="6"
                  Fill="Black" 
                  Name="RectCheck"
                  HorizontalAlignment="Center" 
                  VerticalAlignment="Center" />
            </Grid>
        </BulletDecorator.Bullet>
        <ContentPresenter 
          RecognizesAccessKey="True" 
          Content="{TemplateBinding ContentControl.Content}" 
          ContentTemplate="{TemplateBinding ContentControl.ContentTemplate}" 
          ContentStringFormat="{TemplateBinding ContentControl.ContentStringFormat}" 
          Margin="{TemplateBinding Control.Padding}" 
          HorizontalAlignment="{TemplateBinding Control.HorizontalContentAlignment}" 
          VerticalAlignment="{TemplateBinding Control.VerticalContentAlignment}" 
          SnapsToDevicePixels="{TemplateBinding UIElement.SnapsToDevicePixels}" />
    </BulletDecorator>
    <ControlTemplate.Triggers>
        <Trigger Property="CheckBox.IsChecked" Value="False">
            <Setter TargetName="RectCheck" Property="Visibility" Value="Hidden" />
        </Trigger>
    </ControlTemplate.Triggers>
</ControlTemplate>

Note how the ContentPresenter control defines ContentStringFormat so that it uses whatever string format has been defined on the actual, instanced, check box. Of course, my main programming machine has SP1 installed so it worked fine.

Anyway, for some reason, this works in .NET 3.5 SP1, but not on plain default .NET 3.5. I can’t find much in the documentation about changes brought by SP1 that would explain why it behaves differently, and I don’t think it’s possible to tell ClickOnce that SP1 is a prerequisite to my application (you can only specify .NET 3.5 or not). I could remove that attribute completely, as I never specify it anyway, but it’s not the ideal solution…

The official website for Milkify is now open! Don’t be shy… download Milkify, and leave some feedback.

For those who don’t know about it, Milkify is a desktop client for Remember The Milk, written with WPF. It allows you to manage your tasks from the desktop, the same way Thwirl or Twitterrific manage your tweets. It’s got hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts, so managing tasks is easier and faster than in a web browser. I also have a few ideas up my sleeve to make Milkify really unique in the future, but I obviously need to make the basic functionality solid first.

The source code will still be available at CodePlex.

I was just adding CPPUnit to one of my projects. It ships with old VC6 workspaces, so you need to update them to the latest Visual Studio. While updating them to VS2005, I got a few of those little dialogs:

So? Yes or No? Choose wisely!

These, days, I’m back doing PHP stuff at home, and therefore had to install Apache. Of course, I could do PHP under IIS7, which would be easier, what with the nice administration interface and all, but I need to recreate the same environment as my hosting solution, complete with .htaccess and all that stuff.

One of the first thing you need to do in this situation is to add an alias to your websites because they probably aren’t located in the default documents root. So I did that, I opened httpd.conf in Notepad, edited it, saved it, restarted Apache, and off I went to write some PHP code.

A few days later, I want to move my websites to another directory, and add a few other ones. This time, I open httpd.conf in SciTE because I remember it’s got some nice syntax highlighting for this. I edit it, save it, restart Apache, and… mmmh, Apache doesn’t look like it noticed the changes. It’s still using the old locations, and none of the new ones.

After a couple hours of debugging, reading the logs and cursing at Apache, I realize who’s to blame: Vista. I should have known… I mean, everybody’s blaming it for everything, so I should have followed the crowd from the start. As it always is in these situations, the basic problem was that I was not editing the correct file. This is one of the golden rules of troubleshooting:

If a program looks like it’s not picking up the changes in a file you just edited, you most likely edited the wrong file.

This time, though, I really didn’t think there was a problem. After all, I had an explorer window open on Apache‘s conf directory, and I was either drag and dropping httpd.conf on SciTE, right-cliking and using “Open in SciTE“, or going File > Open directly in SciTE.

When I entered “full paranoid mode” (you know, that mode you get into when nothing works and you feel you don’t trust anything anymore, even the magnetic fields and gravity), I noticed an unknown button in explorer:

Do you see it? It’s the “Compatibility Files” button on the tool bar. “What the fuck is that?“, I thought, and I clicked on it. It led me to this:

I’ve selected the address bar so you can see the physical location of this thing.

All my cursing immediately redirected to Vista.

Scott Hanselman already got burned by the same thing and he explains it all, so go there if you want to know more about this whole thing… but basically, it’s a backward compatibility system that allows “legacy” applications that don’t explicitely require privilege elevation to still “work” by being redirected to a virtual storage when they perform file system operations on items the current user doesn’t have access to. In plain language, it allows crappy applications that assume you’re an Administrator to work correctly even though you’re not.

Now, the problem is that SciTE is not a crappy application. It’s just a text editor. When I opened the file, it should have seen I didn’t have access to that file, therefore treating it like any other read-only file: display a “Read Only” warning in the title bar, prevent me from editing or saving it, etc. But no, because Vista told it otherwise. Vista said “yeah, it’s okay, this file is totally writeable, no problem” while hiding the fact that it was redirecting that process to another place, so SciTE went along with it.

I understand that backward compatibility is a huge thing in the enterprise, and is actually one of the main reasons of Windows‘ commercial success, but it obviously fails in this situation. It’s wrong to tell a text editor that a configuration file is writeable when it’s not. It probably works in lots of other cases, allowing lots of big, expensive legacy programs to run correctly, but it fails here.

Scott suggests that the UI should do a better job of, well, not letting the user waste time figuring out where his files went, but I think the problem is deeper. I think this kind of “feature” should be a choice in the first place, not something that’s forced upon the user. The assumption that users are Administrators was in the long run a mistake, and there’s no way around a mistake without getting bitten in the ass at some point. There should be a way to just face it, and risk breaking programs. This is not desirable in most business places, but it may be desirable on lambda users’ machines. Yes, it would break stuff, but Vista already had a hard time with it already anyway, and Apple managed to go through a similarly harsh transitions before. We should be able to install Windows without 20 years of Side by Side libraries and “magical” weirdnesses like this one if we want to.